Phoenix Café (18 page)

“To tell the truth, we were scared. We didn’t expect you to black out.”

“I haven’t played for a very long time. About a hundred and twenty years.” Misha snorted. Catherine giggled.

“It’s quite safe. You can’t take the visor off, that worried you in there. But it really isn’t dangerous. The nanotech in the eyedrops degrades after about an hour objective time. It gets dismantled, absorbed into your brain chemistry, it’s harmless. If you can’t wait, you can still leave. All you have to do is
head for the exit,
just the same as ever, only it happens in your mind.”

“I’ll remember that.” She laughed. “You told me you didn’t play the games! You were extremely cutting about gaming hells!”

“We don’t play the commercial pap. We only play our own. The fact is, I can’t imagine life without gaming,” he said seriously. “Or at least: I can imagine. It would be like being smothered.”

“You write the code yourselves?”

“Some of us do. It’s a co-op, like the cafés.”

They were alone. He hadn’t come in here to talk about games tech.

“You were here before,” he whispered. “I can’t grasp that. Whether you believe it, or whether it’s the truth. I don’t know who you are; how to treat you.”

Catherine drew up her knees and leaned her chin on her folded arms. “I’m Catherine. My mother is called Leonie; she’s Lord Maitri’s human cook. Let’s say Lord Maitri adopted me as a fetus, from who knows where, and had his cook carry me to term. He brought me up as an Aleutian and conditioned me to believe I’m the reincarnation of the Third Captain, his chosen lord and one of his dearest friends. He was lonely, you see. So few of the original adventurers had come back for this last life on Earth. I can’t help believing I’m Clavel. You don’t have to think about it. I’m Catherine. Is that better?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No, I’m not.” Catherine frowned. “What does it matter? From moment to moment, I’m Catherine. I remember, I forget. Can you remember everything that you were doing yesterday? Are you the same person? I’m not wise; I’m not a super being. I’m not even a grown up. A lot of Aleutians think Clavel is
never
a grown up. Treat me like that.”

He pressed her shoulders back against the wall behind the couch, and kissed her on the mouth, gripping her upper arms. Catherine responded to the kiss, instantly. Misha, his mouth open against hers, slid his free hand inside the gauzy jacket and found her breast, worked it free of the clinging underbodice. A rush of arousal flooded between them. She arched her back, insensately offering the base of her throat, where in an Aleutian body wanderers would be teeming at this moment, hurrying to be gobbled up by Catherine’s lover.

Misha drew back: he laughed excitedly.

“I warned you about the alcohol, Miss Alien!”

“Alcohol?” she repeated, puzzled.

She saw her own dead image reflected in the mirror of his eyes.

He pinned her with his weight, reached under her skirts and pushed her thighs apart. Catherine began to struggle. “Misha, what are you doing? Stop it! Not like this! Why are you doing this to me?” She couldn’t stop him, and couldn’t make him answer. It was over too soon, he’d finished. He stood up and backed away, still breathing hard, sealing the closure of his overalls; staring down at her in sullen reproach.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t want that.”

He went and leaned against the wall by the toilet cubicles, put his head in his hands and drew a deep breath. He looked up, but didn’t look at Catherine.

“I’ve ordered you a cab. I’ll tell Garland you’ll be out in a moment. I’m leaving now, don’t follow me.”

Leaf Garland was the café manager this evening.

In the house at the Giratoire, Maitri and Vijaya were waiting in the atrium. They worried about Catherine, because of the growing risk of intercommunal violence. She went with them to the main hall, where the Aleutians were gathered for the night. Atha and his friends were playing their favorite musical game, capping each other’s variations in the wordless, expert harmonies of the Silent.

“You don’t seem to have much time for us these days.” Maitri shrugged warmly. “Don’t apologize, I’m very glad. Didn’t I introduce you to young Michael? Now tell us about your evening and the fun you’ve had.”

She managed to leave them at last, pleading her human need for sleep. In her own room she huddled on her bed, blessing the deficiencies of Aleutian mind-reading. I am Catherine, she thought. This is my life. The keening voices of the old retainers, Maitri’s unbearable patience with their whims. Atha’s constant, exhausting need to be of use: the chaplain’s rambling. Vijaya and Smrti with their endless, irritating old roués’ gossip. She took off her human clothes. Nothing was torn but there was a small bloodstain, like a split heart, penetrating the layers of her white underskirts. It was fading. It would have vanished soon.

She stared at the blood. A great trembling began deep inside her, deep in the core of her being. She felt very cold.

5
The Stardate Diaries

i

Thérèse waited in the inner office, an austere room, made large by well-tailored illusion but very simply decorated in a classic style: polished desk, corporate art, impressive antique furniture. False windows showed the autumn leaves falling in an Old Earth orchard garden; the broad cold plains, a dark forest. She lay in the embrace of a shapely armchair, cheeks flushed and lips parted; both hands tucked childishly between her thighs, where the layers of skirt and underskirt were not such a bastion of modesty as they appeared from a distance. Her straying fingers occasionally touched a soft little mat of pubic hair. She was waiting for her mother, who was in a telepresence meeting. She was certainly dozing, with kittenish signs that sexual arousal played a part in her dreams, but her long green eyes, half closed, drowsily followed the news coverage of her mother’s business, relayed to an antique monitor on Mrs. Khan’s desk.

Three hundred years ago, a German physicist called Peenemünde Buonarotti made a discovery of world-shattering importance.

The screen showed a daylight sky, scattered with brilliant points of light; stars too close and large to be hidden by the system’s sun: an unreal landscape, all the colors not false but eye-hurtingly wrong. This was a clip from one of the “Stardate Diary” entries, supposedly movies made by Peenemünde Buonarotti herself, from memory, when she returned from her weird, occult test-flights. Long believed to be fiction, later accepted as genuine reportage…. Next Peenemünde appeared, a large woman in a mannish long white overshirt, with her back to the viewers at an old-fashioned workstation. She glowed from head to toe, shedding the radiance of genius and good-will from every pore. Dish aerials, satellites, observatory domes like cartoon mushrooms decorated the margins of her screen, binary code shooting in rhythmic bursts between them (an artistic impression of Pre-Contact science).

But she was unable to develop her invention, because of insurmountable difficulties. Insurmountable, that is, to human endeavor.

The arrival of the Aleutians intervened, and Peenemünde’s great work was tainted by the plotting of anti-Aleutian fanatics.

Buonarotti’s splendid form shifted tetral by tetral into the mean, lean moody figure of Clementina Stewart, scientific director of the secret resistance movement called “White Queen.” Braemar Wilson and Johnny Guglioli, the saboteurs themselves, had been Traditionalists and could not be vilified. Clementina, notorious in the First Contact story as an embittered member of the “third sex,” had been the first to examine a stolen sample of Aleutian tissue, and, ironically, the first to observe the proof that aliens were no different mind, but very different flesh. She was always cast as Buonarotti’s evil twin. She was depicted standing, peering into a tiny black microscope like a child’s toy (a rather sketchily researched historical detail). The margins of her frame were the shuttling ridged and twined molecular chains that filled an Aleutian wanderer, an “information cell”: unlike in detail, astonishingly similar in conformation and in significance to the structure known to humans as DNA.

In the tragedy of the Sabotage Crisis, and through the harsh years of the Gender Wars, the Buonarotti device was lost.

Out fades Clementina, and Traditionalist masses appear: fleeing from burning cities (no cities were destroyed in the Gender Wars. Cities survived. It was the land outside that burned. But never mind). Running down bunker corridors. Tramping, the blind leading the blind, in endless lines across the battlefields; hordes of women wrapped in ragged veils and weeping over dead children. Thérèse sighed resignedly, slept for microseconds and peeped, alternately, until the obligatory propaganda sequences were over.

The Youro governments’ official newscasts never missed a chance to snivel over their casualties and losses in the War

But let the twisting chains of life return. Red for Aleutian, blue for human. Let shuttling chemical processes morph into skeins of stars, twisting and shifting, entering and re-entering each other in the dark and fertile void.

It was the Second Captain of the Expedition, Kumbva the engineer,

(a clip of Kumbva, the massively built alien clad in a white suit and animator’s gloves, shrugging enigmatically in Aleutian style low-rez)…who divined, over a hundred years ago, that the Diaries were a true record, and that the saboteurs had reached the shipworld by means of an instantaneous travel device. Kumbva lived among humans, and initiated the practical development of non-location travel, a joint human-Aleutian venture which now approaches the moment of triumph!

Banal “Thus Spake Zarathustra” type music. The Wright Brothers’ funny little crooked flying machine, stumbling about the sky, and morphing into a passenger jet. The jet morphing into a clunky long-defunct International Space Station, waltzing in the starry dark. And at last here’s the news item.

Now read on!

The Buonarotti project laboratory stood in wilderness, in a region of the Youroan national parks: as far away as possible from any center of population. External shots of the location were forbidden for security reasons; the coverage went straight to an interior view of the Aleutian half of the workspace. The local (human) dignitaries were not in the lab in the flesh, of course, humans were banned from this space for safety reasons: but this was not obvious on the screen. Actually, nothing looked real, not even with the fuzzy realism of Aleutian records. Possibly the antique CGI effect was some kind of nod to the fashionable Renaissance movement. More likely it was another security feature. The Project Manager was making a rare in-person visit from the shipworld; Mrs. Khan was one of the Youro politicians lining up looking honored—

Thérèse, sleepily watching, saw a red-walled hall with a long irregular empty space running down the center. Lumpy counters, lumpy gobs and blobs swinging like slime-molds from the ceiling; half-recognizable extrusions jutting from the walls. Aleutian technicians were at work (or something), weirdly squatting on those counters. They mostly seemed to be chewing, rocking to and fro, or spitting on things. Whip-like connections flickered: monstrous living machines crawled about the floor.

It annoyed her, though she was used to this government censorship effect, that she couldn’t focus closely on anything. She couldn’t change the angle of her view, or peer into corners. The image was fixed and delimited, as if her head was in a bridle, or as if she was really asleep and dreaming.

In theory the telepresent politicians had more freedom, but they wouldn’t dare to use it. Eyes front. Try to control your body language.

There was a voiceover, and speeches were being made, but Thérèse didn’t bother to listen. She followed, idly, the unraveling and remaking of the expressions on human faces. The switching of positions in the human group; the brushing out, or daring emphasis, of alien grotesquerie. Political agents in the global grid were bidding, buying and selling fractional rights to what appeared on screen. Who got the best lighting. Whose lines were edited to the opposite meaning; or snipped out entirely. It was intolerable, really. Eventually it would stop changing. It would be dead, and reeled off, secondhand, by humble hacks like Mâtho’s father. She closed her eyes, bored. What is truth? Whatever it is, it doesn’t get into the news.

ii

Local facilities were austere. The dignitary from orbit and his entourage had been obliged to walk, from their spaceplane to the labs. They’d found this very interesting. For some it was their first visit to a planetary surface since the day they’d left Home, so many lives ago.

inquired the chief scientist, after the rituals of embracing, showing throat, exchanging wanderers—to which he’d submitted with his usual poor grace.

The telepresent humans were greeted, with local gestures in which the Project Manager had been schooled by his aides. For a while the whole ensemble stood solemnly in front of a large virtual screen running
Stardate Diaries
excerpts. The Aleutians were deeply uninterested in interplanetary travelogue; their appetite for adventure was sated. But they had no problem with showing respect: this was a character record, and Buonarotti was a hero.

The Manager, a non-spoken-language user, had taken the Sanskrit name Gharvapinda. In this name he was greeted in Spoken Word by the humans, and responded (, he ordered briefly) through his speechmaker. His real identity, inscribed in the prolix, complex and shifting chemical signature that filled the air around him, might have been expressed, in this context, as
The Busy Person Who Accepts The Necessity For These Public Appeasements Of The Natives. But Does Not Enjoy Them.

There were two halves to the reconstruction of Peenemünde Buonarotti’s instantaneous travel device. The particle accelerator, or “Torus,” was being built out in space, safe from anti-Aleutian terrorists and future outbreaks of mass violence—a fine big one, the Aleutian artisans and technicians having been determined to make an impression, when they found out about the dimensions of these structures on Earth. No problem there. The other half of the equation, the means of turning a whole living person, live tissue and inert tissue; mind and body, into “particles” that could be sent flying around the ring, had been reserved for the locals’ home ground, by the terms of the Neubrandenburg Agreement. It had proved recalcitrant. Buonarotti’s notes were few; he had deliberately left his instructions incomplete. The actual “couch” used by Buonarotti had long ago been loved to death, hopelessly Aleutianized by investigating secretions; without having given up its mysteries. Kumbva the engineer and his generation had departed; Kumbva had not returned, and there was no other engineer of genius in the Brood. Research had slowed to a crawl.

There’d been a very natural reaction on the shipworld, after the first excitement of the discovery. Once people believed they
could
return Home, all urgency vanished. The Torus was interesting; the “translation” labs were far away on Earth. There’d been endless petty difficulties with the humans, a rapid (for Aleutians) series of lackluster appointments: everything had conspired to mask, for decades of local years, an entire lack of real progress. The change had come when another of the Landing Party veterans had unexpectedly taken over. This person was held to be that troublesome thing, a scientist of genius, but he certainly wasn’t an engineer. The appointment had been something of a face-saving exercise, for the “Buonarotti” faction in the shipworld corridors of power. It had proved climactic.

The new chief scientist had brought a different attitude, and made spectacular progress. He’d had to insist, due to the nature of this progress, on a rigorous quarantine between human and local staff. So now the reconstruction was divided into three halves, which had not gone down well with the locals; they seemed to have some conceptual difficulty obscure to any Aleutian: but opinion on the shipworld was in favor. The Aleutians had told the human politicians the division of labor was a positive thing. It meant the Device was seriously close to operational effectiveness, and the Departure was near.

They were leaving.

The announcement probably should have been delayed. But the Expedition to Earth was now managed by shipworld Aleutians, who had no comprehension of the human mindset. The promise of imminent Departure (no definite timescale, but imminent!) had not calmed things down. Far from it. The whole giant planet had become restive, the politicians were clamoring to know when the crucial technology (now being developed in complete secrecy) would be handed over. Hence the necessity for ritual visits of this kind.

The tour of the Aleutian lab began. It wouldn’t take long. Then the aliens would leave and walk around to the other side of the building, where the human telepresents would join them again to inspect the human lab. For safety reasons Aleutians and humans must worked separately; for political reasons they must share a roof. The group moved slowly, dutifully attentive, down the central reservation. On either side, visible but blurred by fine gel partitions, technicians went on with their work (as much as people ever do, with an official visitation peering over their shoulders).

remarked the shipworld dignitary to the chief scientist.

explained Dr. Bright. he went on, airily.

said the newly-named Gharvapinda, with a chill to which Dr. Bright was congenitally oblivious.

The Busy Person was important enough to use the term “Silent,” at present rather socially dubious, without a qualm.

Dr. Bright grinned.